Financial Housekeeping
Dec. 1st, 2006 08:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebI paid the last of my bills for November, so now I'm all caught up with that.
**
In end-of-the-month financial news, my net worth increased 5.5% over the last month, mostly because my house is supposedly worth $150,000 this month. Scary. But everything else went up as well, except for my plummeting Whole Foods stock.
But I didn't save as much (non-retirement money) as I wanted to. That's the category where I determine the amount based on what's leftover at the end of the month. This month I am resolving to see exactly where every penny is going so I can figure out why I'm always so surprised about these small leftover amounts.
**
Today was the first day I could set up automatic withdrawals into our newly available Roth 403(b) accounts. And I did it! Check! It's done! You may be thinking that of course I am the type of person to get this done, but actually I'm the type of person to put this kind of thing off.
I had to create yet another TWO sets of logon names and passwords--one for my company's retirement website and one for the company where I want to invest. One name required a format that did not allow me to re-use any names I have ever used. And both passwords required a new format. One required a different number of digits than any of my existing passwords; the other one had to have letters and numbers plus limitations on which digits could be which.)
So, anyway, I had researched which company to go with and had begun research on fund(s) to go with. Today I checked out all the mutual funds offered, and found four whose performance looked good compared to their benchmarks.
Then I compared their performance over the last five years with each other to see which which were relatively low, because different sectors go up and down at different times. Usually. All four of these were pretty much lock-step with each other, rising and falling simultaneously with each other. Two rose and fell at slower rates than the other two, so I compared the fees of the two that rose more quickly and chose the one with the lower fee. Then I indicated to put 100% of my $100 per month in that fund.
**
And now I'm going to update my Amazon wish list because it's getting to be that time of year again.
**
In end-of-the-month financial news, my net worth increased 5.5% over the last month, mostly because my house is supposedly worth $150,000 this month. Scary. But everything else went up as well, except for my plummeting Whole Foods stock.
But I didn't save as much (non-retirement money) as I wanted to. That's the category where I determine the amount based on what's leftover at the end of the month. This month I am resolving to see exactly where every penny is going so I can figure out why I'm always so surprised about these small leftover amounts.
**
Today was the first day I could set up automatic withdrawals into our newly available Roth 403(b) accounts. And I did it! Check! It's done! You may be thinking that of course I am the type of person to get this done, but actually I'm the type of person to put this kind of thing off.
I had to create yet another TWO sets of logon names and passwords--one for my company's retirement website and one for the company where I want to invest. One name required a format that did not allow me to re-use any names I have ever used. And both passwords required a new format. One required a different number of digits than any of my existing passwords; the other one had to have letters and numbers plus limitations on which digits could be which.)
So, anyway, I had researched which company to go with and had begun research on fund(s) to go with. Today I checked out all the mutual funds offered, and found four whose performance looked good compared to their benchmarks.
Then I compared their performance over the last five years with each other to see which which were relatively low, because different sectors go up and down at different times. Usually. All four of these were pretty much lock-step with each other, rising and falling simultaneously with each other. Two rose and fell at slower rates than the other two, so I compared the fees of the two that rose more quickly and chose the one with the lower fee. Then I indicated to put 100% of my $100 per month in that fund.
**
And now I'm going to update my Amazon wish list because it's getting to be that time of year again.